A/N: Bioware owns everything, from their stupid digital distribution platform called Origin, down to Zaeed's cigars. I'm just here for the plot bunnies. Speaking of, warning: spoilers ahoy, and major but explained cannon tweaking to suit my needs. You should be warned that I'm not a particularly good writer. Really, I've tried, but I lack the dedication for it. Too easily distracted, perhaps? Regardless, I woke up with an idea... a bit of mind cannon if you would, and I wanted to share it. For what it's worth; enjoy.
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They find her at the bottom of a shaft in the Catalyst's control room. Electricity burns streaking down broken limbs, wrapping around bullet wounds.
But alive.
James Vega is the first to spot her, unconscious and yet- 'Dios mío, found her! Commander, you hear me? Lola!' -is still breathing steadily.
Samara, barely on her feet after a lunging brute ripped her open from navel to shoulder the day prior, pulls her out of the conduit tube that continues to glow faintly red. Gently, a biotic lift with perfect control deposits the broken form on a gurney.
Commander Shepard is rushed by shuttle to the new global capitol of Fukuoka, Japan. Capitol city by default, as the reapers hadn't paid island nations nearly as much attention. The best -remaining- doctors from around the world are pulled in, likely costing the lives and delaying the care of others. She wouldn't want that, they know, but no one so much as murmurs a protest when they find out who it is for.
Not two weeks pass before all of the very best have given up.
Jane Shepard is breathing, her heart beats, she has brain activity even. She hasn't moved an inch. A remote QEC signal terminal is set up so Dr. Chakwas can have a look from light years away. Miranda Lawson, wheel chair bound and high as a kite on pain meds, makes it in to brain storm with her. What they find, that the so called 'best' had overlooked, is horrifying. Her brain signals are screaming, wailing, demanding her body to move. It isn't responding. The remaining non-reaper cybernetics are keeping her heart beating at minimum levels. The nerve signal to contract heart tissue isn't even happening, the implants are working as a suped up pacemaker. It is like this with every critical organ. Karin watches a bloom of brain activity on the console, the commander is trying to speak and raise her left arm. Nothing moves.
Commander Shepard is trapped in her own body.
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The QEC terminal that relays the signal via London from the almost-repaired Normandy is installed in the room. Permanent staff are assigned to act as hands for Dr. Chakwas and -still incapacitated, should really be resting- Miranda Lawson. The staff aren't particularly hopeful, but they've yet to accept that the commander had been dead once already. Miranda smiles grimly when she hears orderlies gossip over it in the cafeteria, disbelieving.
A month and change see the Normandy back to Earth. The 12 minute relay trip taking almost two weeks by normal FTL travel. The crew, new and old, take up various residences around the oblong city block that makes up the hospital compound. They take rotations at clean up, various find and fetch tasks. They visit Shepard, someone always in the room, after they figure out that she can hear. She is awake, and can listen. Garrus and Joker are voted to extra shifts after they discover the part of her brain that controls humor lights up at their wise cracking.
Someone is always, always in the room.
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Miranda Lawson is crying. She isn't one to weep, it isn't productive you see, but these are tears of frustration. Her face is calm, her eyes barely redened, but the tears leak regardless as she sits quietly in the lady's restroom for a moment. It's been four months since the Reapers fell from the sky, and nothing they've tried has had even minor results. Jane Shepard's nervous system won't 'talk' to cloned nerve tissue, or artificial cybernetic nerves, or anything else. They can observe the signals being sent out, irregular and with more strength then needed, but the results always vary between wild uncontrolled twitches and nothing.
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EDI wakes up to the despondent slouch of Joker, sitting in her chair in the cockpit. A digital frown forms in her mind, as she tries to take stock as her systems continue booting up. Of course, the cameras in the cockpit are the first on the boot list, the rest of the ship's flicker to life quickly, and soon she can see Tali'Zorah, Samantha Traynor, Gabby Daniels, and Ken Donnelly standing in the AI core. Fingers crossed, which looks so very silly on Tali's hands, and with bated breath. They're focused on her mobile platform, which lies unmoving on a server bank. EDI feels a rush of affection for her crew.
"Hello. I appear to have suffered a critical failure after our previous relay jump." Her voice comes from the speakers in the room, cold and emotionless. She can see Specialist Traynor's face drop suddenly, before her eyes firm as she tries for a smile and replies.
"Well I don't think you're 100% yet EDI, but it's good to see you -she eyes the motionless silver body-... awake again." EDI can hear the warbling edge to her normally crisp accent, the distress. Several of her logic processes are trying to figure out the best reply to put her at ease, and several more and trying to figure out what is wrong with her vocal synthesizer. She starts up a full system diagnostic.
"Several of my components appear to be offline. My cyber warfare suite is unavailable, as are my connections to communications, navigation, and engineering. I am also having difficulty expressing emotion with my vocal synthesizer." Gabby and Ken share a look, before Tali clears her throat and replies in a particularly thick version of the lilting Quarian accent she got from growing up on the Rayya.
"We had to reduce the stress on your systems quite a bit to, well... ah... yes. And. Are you still, er... feeling emotions? Even if you can't express them?" EDI thought for a moment, double checking.
"Yes, of course, Ms. Zorah."
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'Every day, every single day, is unique and busy and too goddamn long', thinks Zaeed Massani as he begs off more requests for volunteer work in some city or another the next day. He's still bloody well digging people and supplies out of rubble today, nevermind tomorrow. He finds several cases of beer, surprisingly intact, not a moment later. Zaeed considers the label as he pops one open then and there. 'It's not the best beer ever,' he thinks 'hell, it's not even half ways decent.' The green and blue flowery font of some micro-brewery marks the front, and he smacks his tongue off the roof of his mouth; the first taste hoppier then goddamn rabbits in spring.
Well, he knows what he's doing tomorrow. Zaeed Massani is going to share this hoppy shit with the other lucky bastards to survive London. Maybe even sneak some into Shepard's feeding tube. Hah.
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It was going on five months when Miranda caught Zaeed paying off a nurse to slip half a beer into Shepard's feeding unit. She would've been more angry, except that the permanent feed of Jane's brain activity above the bed was lighting up like a Christmas tree at the prospect of shitty beer and yet another probably-not-exaggerated tale of Zaeed the bounty hunter.
Then he said something that...
"Say that again?" Miranda asked. Zaeed turned away from the bed, eyebrow raised.
"I said, then they let him out of that goddamn cell. Deadset, he got into the labs not a day later and started running the bodies around, like bloody puppets."
"With VIs?"
"Yeah, jus' had a whole series of them -what the- where are..." Whatever else he said went unheard as Miranda took off down the hospital corridor to the cybernetics labs.
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The doctors actually had the gall to complain about 'such a wanton use of precious resources on a hopeless case'. Miranda and Karin ignored them, their disapproving looks, and it wasn't long before they had replaced Shepard's entire peripheral nervous system with a synthetic one. The surgeries took a long damn time.
The staff was floored when Jane Shepard, after half a year of nothing, muttered 'Ungh'.
The VI that reinterpreted the outgoing nervous signals from Jane's brain was a thing of programming beauty. Miranda had worked tirelessly on it, sometimes leaving the surgeries to enable it to Dr. Chakwas entirely. Karin painstakingly installed lines of synthetic nerve at the cellular level, and grafted the housing for a miniaturized, sectioned, super computer along the back of her spine. By the time they were done, Shepard's second escape from death had cost almost half as much as her first. It was all worth it to see her eyes open, though the left more then the right; and her muttered 'Ungh' and slow upward twitch to the right corner of her mouth.
It only took a few days for them to realize that a VI was not fast enough, not complex enough, just not enough to keep up with the neurological activity and reinterpretation. Jane was getting better all the time. She just couldn't do anything quickly. Elcor would run out of patience for her to get anything done.
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Some Geth units had remained behind on Earth when the Flotilla's reinforcements left for Rannoch. Able to work tirelessly, and wanting to honor Shepard-Commander, nearly 300 platforms containing 647,325 Geth processes stayed to help Earth rebuild. Their representative, platform 741-085 designation Caesar, was called in to advise, along with EDI via the QEC and any crew or hospital staff who thought they could help.
It was a good thing the room they housed Shepard in was so big. Even with all the equipment pushed out of the way, and the low table and couch removed, the pow-wow of experts was crowded.
"Thank you everyone for coming. Straight to business, shall we? So... here is our problem," began Dr. Chakwas, "Shepard's original, non-functional Peripheral Nervous System has been completely replaced with a synthetic one. Even then, her Central and Peripheral systems won't 'talk' to each other. We've managed to circumvent that by connecting them with VI that reinterprets the incoming signal from the brain and spine, and sends the appropriate outgoing signal rather then the ineffective original. A translator, if you will.
The room made various motions of acknowledgement: optic panels flapped, heads nodded.
"The issue," continued Miranda, "is that a VI is only so intuitive. It can't easily learn, adapt to, or process quickly enough the variety and complexity of signals we need it to handle."
"Teeeeeelllllll m-m-mmmmmmeeee aboout iiiiiiiiiiiiiiit." Shepard slurred over the course of nearly seven seconds, an eternity for a phrase that would normally be said in less then two. A pause occurred before part of her mouth smiled upward, then slowly, the other half too; trying to distract from the painful longness of her comment. Garrus, a mathematical genius of calibration in his own right, helped instead by choking back a quiet keen of distress, and instead cracking a joke about zombie commanders needing brains that had Shepard making a quiet gurgle of chuckles.
"We do not understand." added Caesar, which just made the chuckling louder and more wide spread.
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After several hours of back and forth, the brain storming came down to several conclusions. The most serious being that, while Shepard could get by with what she had now, and a few improvements could be made, she'd never walk or talk or interact fast enough to do anything but sit at home. Some calibrations to her VI could focus the signal on certain things, such as more rapid eye movement for reading, but at the cost of other functions. She'd be like a frame-by-frame slow motion vid, all day, every day. Jane Shepard had wanted dearly to rest after the Reapers were defeated, but this... this was a bit much.
It occurred to EDI that the functional limitations that were derailing Shepard were the same functions she would have used to activate her now-derelict mobile platform.
Shepard didn't have the functionality for her body. EDI herself didn't have a body to function.
"Commander Shepard, I have an idea."
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So they wheeled the Commander over to the Normandy, up the cargo bay ramp and the mockingly slow elevator, through medbay, and into the AI core. A long, hyper-dense, hard-line cable is plugged straight from EDI's blue box into the calibration port along Shepard's spine at the third cervical vertibrae. EDI asks that Jane remain still for a few moments while she analyzes the VI's current operational data, and shuts it down, taking the VI from the spinal computer and dropping it into some empty server space to give herself more room, and then her system -she tries to rephrase it, but it still sounds just like- assumes direct control.
After a breath-holding three and a half minutes, EDI asks her to begin activity and to describe any action which gives her difficulty for the sake of micro-calibrating her interpretations on a level a VI would never be capable of.
A mouthful of technical jargon, to which Commander Shepard replies, "You g-got it EDI." To everyone's joyous, hopeful shock.
Then she stands up.
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The cable only stretches about half-way into medbay. Past that line, Jane Shepard is -she hates to admit it- a cripple. On this side of the line, the best thing Cerberus ever made has dedicated processes modifying a copy of her own mobile action/function protocols to better suit the Commander. Every step is smoother, every head tilt and shoulder roll more natural looking, natural feeling. A few days in, you'd never know she'd been bed ridden for half a year. The cybernetics even staved off the muscle loss. Now, they pull out all the tubes and wires, except one. They add a bed, a private terminal, and a truck for her possessions. They're roomies now, until something better is figured. Shepard doesn't mind that she can't leave the ship, she just wishes the damn cable was a bit longer.
After her first non-feeding tube lunch; a surprisingly good spaghetti which enthralled EDI with the second-hand experience of taste, she asks for a favor.
"Commander, I have a request to make."
"What can I do for you EDI?" Shepard looks up from the report she's reading to chase off the food coma of her maybe-too-big lunch, catching up on all the little things she missed while recovering.
"May I invite Jeff to visit the AI core? He appears more stressed then usual today. Positive physical contact, such as a hug would be beneficial... and I would like to hug him." She quirks an eyebrow at the holo terminal where EDI's avatar sits. It's changed from a blue ball to a low resolution copy of her mobile platform. Shepard thinks perhaps EDI is missing having a body. The fact that she could 'puppet' Shepard around didn't fail to occur to anyone, and the commander is suddenly hit by the fact that EDI doesn't seemed to be tempted by it. Hadn't tried it.
"Of course EDI, why don't you phrase it to him as keeping me company? Even better, invite him for dinner with us later, and we can try and coax whatever is causing the stress out of him."
"I will do so. You have proven better at working past Jeff's deflective use of humor as a coping mechanism then most other crew. I appreciate your assistance."
"You're not too bad at it yourself, EDI."
It was quiet for a few moments, likely while EDI discussed the idea with Joker.
"...Shepard, I will need to make dinner accommodations. What is your preferred food?" A grin comes over the commander's face. EDI has enabled her to move again, the least she can do in return is make some concessions for curious AI who want to know what things taste like, and miss hugging their pilots.
"Watermelon is my favorite, actually, but for dinner something like meatloaf or pizza might be more appropriate."
Of course, EDI managed -and how did she even find this in the post apocalypse?- for watermelon and pizza to be delivered for dinner.
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A/N: Annnnnd that's it. That's a wrap people. Thanks for joining me. If I had the gumption I'd write out the journey of Sheppard becoming a badass, AI reaction speed enhanced, pirate killing rockstar of the well earned post apocalypse. Probably as a Rear Admiral, because strategy is cool, with occasional 'gotta do it yourself' action. Buuuut... I'm done. You do it. :)